I want to note that although the original problem was about bzr there have been reports about cvs and git and other things on the same systems too. It really isn't a bzr specific thing and that emacs has moved to git doesn't really change anything. Given enough use the same problem will manifest itself with git too since it is a resource problem on the same system.

There has definitely been a performance problem for a long time. It has been noticed. It has been discussed. (Try the -email is unavailable- mailing list, aka -email is unavailable- list.) But no one understands it well enough to propose a solution. Why are things slow?

The problem is suspected to be on the vcs VM. The web site frontend interfaces to the vcs backend. (Could be on the frontend.) The vcs VM is configured for 7 cpus and 6G of ram. It is mostly cpu idle and lots of ram. But at times it runs a very high load average up to 20, but still with an idle cpu. Theories have come and gone. I could tell you my current theory is that the xen vm is I/O slow. Whenever it is doing a lot of I/O is when it seems to really bog down. But other theories have come and gone already so this one might too.

I don't know anything about how BZR works so that is harder for me to debug. But CVS and SVN are similarly slow. Dora has reported problems with those months ago. There is a cycle when it is worse than other times. The worst times seem to be around zero-dark-thirty for my timezone making it painful for me to observe the problem first hand. Unfortunately that is midmorning for Dora and the folks over there. Some folks have been experiencing it much worse than others.

BTW I tried your sample URL and it came up within a couple of seconds. No problem at this moment. (shrug.) But I don't doubt that it has been bad because we all have seen it be terrible before. It must be an interaction of things.

I have been trying to get dom0 access so that I can fix the grub boot process to be reliable. (It isn't set to upgrade well.) And until then I am fearful of reboots because it sometimes fails to come up and then it is a mad scramble to find an FSF admin to rescue the system. This request is in the pipeline and at some point it will pop through. Then it will be reboots and upgrades all around. From my viewpoint that is the next thing to do to it.

The Savannah Web interface for the GNU Emacs main source repository is so slow that it's embarrassing. It's been slow for months, and I figured someone would notice and fix it, but apparently not. For example, if I visit this URL: